Too Many Dicks at the Writing Desk, or, How to Organise aProphetic Sausage-Fest
Roland BoerAbstract: The key issue for this paper is the role of writing in both theproduction of and instabilities in prophetic masculinity. I draw upon threesources: the work of Lévi-Strauss concerning the ‘writing experiment’,Christina Petterson’s exploration of the role of writing in constructing theruling class in colonial Greenland, and some of my older work concerningthe auto-referentiality of references to writing and scribal activity in theHebrew Bible. Armed with these theoretical strings, the paper has twophases – what may be called ‘organising the sausage-fest’ and ‘too manydicks at the writing desk’. The first concerns the production of masculinity,the second its problems.So, in the initial sausage-fest I argue that the subtle and over-ridingprocess of producing masculinity in the prophetic books is through therepresentation of the act of writing – what may be called the act of thespermatic spluttering pen(ise)s. In attributing writing to the writingprophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel), rather than merely ‘recording’what they said and did, the scribes write themselves into the story. Notonly do scribe and prophet merge into one, with the written and writingprophet acting as a cipher for the scribe, but the scribe easily slips intothe zone of absolute power, one in which even God obeys his dictates. Nowimps here, no effeminate and weakly scribes (contra Boyarin); writing isthe means of constructing a very male ruling class.However, no hegemony is ever complete, able to rest at peace in itspower. In order to examine the way the scribal act of masculineproduction runs into trouble, I focus upon the anomalies of thisconstructed coterie of ruling males, especially the way the all-powerfulrole of prophetic scribal activity becomes masturbatory. Both the story of ‘Jeremiah the bejerked’ and the narrative of Ezekiel’s auto-fellatio revealthe absurdity of the extraordinary claims made by the scribal prophet whoconstructs the world itself, let alone its masculine class structure in whichhe is supreme. IN fact, we fold back to the fundamental creation story of Egypt, in which Atum-Ra masturbates into his fist and thereby creates theworld.In Ezekiel, chapter nine, verses 2-3 and 11 we find an extraordinarilycurious phrase:
weqeseth hasofer bemotnayw
.
Commentators are not
1
I use the SBL Handbook’s general-purpose style of transliteration, mainly to facilitateease of reading across different computers.
2
keen to make much of it, usually rendering it as something like ‘a writingcase at his side’, or perhaps ‘a writing kit at his loins’.
Let us take amoment to see what it actually means, for it will become a key marker formy argument concerning masculinity in prophetic texts.As for Ezekiel 9,
qeseth
is one of those Ezekelian hapax legomena,to which commentators a little too rapidly attribute the meaning of –perhaps – a writing case or inkpot or tablet, albeit with the flimsiest of evidence. It may be worth asking why commentators make nothing of thistext, preferring a neutral sense for a hapax legomenon like
qeseth
, whenin other cases – such as the explicit texts of Ezekiel 16 and 22-23 – theoverwhelmingly male coterie of biblical scholars is all too ready to espy inhapax legomenae references to women’s genitals. Is it because thesexualising the textual bodies of women is a way of objectifying andthereby disempowering them, while the textual bodies of men must notbe so treated? If so, then my reading is an explicit attempt to sexualise,objectify and thereby disempower textual male bodies.
So, in light of what follows, I suggest that here we have a tool, or more specifically astylus of the one who follows. And he is the
sofer
, simply a scribe, onewho writes texts and does things with numbers; the word is the qalpresent participle of the verb
sfr
, to write and number.
Qeseth sofer
isthen the tool of the writer, the scribal stylus.
But what about
bemotnayw
? The preposition
be
is obvious, but letus stay with its basic sense of ‘on’ or even ‘in’. And
motnayw
is themasculine singular possessive of
motnayim
. Note the dual form, for thatwill soon become important.
Motnayim
is supposed, according to lexica, todesignate the muscles binding the abdomen to the lower limbs – abs, aswe might call them in our parlance. In this respect, it is a parallel term to
halatsayim
, the section of the body between the ribs and the hip bones.But there is one curious, usually unexplained feature of both terms, hintedat in the brilliant older translation as ‘loins’: both words end in the raredual form. As any student of introductory Hebrew knows, two classes of
2
Commentators are spectacular in missing the importance of this verse, perhapsbecause its claims are unremarkable for the male guild of biblical scholars (Zimmerli1979b: 248; Eichrodt 1970: 130-1; Cooke 1985: 104; Greenberg 1983: 176). If anycomment is made, it involves one of the commentator’s favourite moves: repeat aspeculative point made by another, but now as a thoroughly verifiable statement. In thiscase it involves a loose etymological connection with an Egyptian (!) word,
gst(y)
,perhaps a dubious picture, and thereby it is established that scribes would carry theirhorns somewhere in the nether regions.
3
Thanks to Stefanie Schön for this observation when she responded to an early versionof this chapter presented to a seminar at the Centre for Gender Research at theUniversity of Oslo, 15 October 2010.
4
Or, as Greenberg unwittingly and ambiguously puts it, ‘a scribe’s kit’ (Greenberg 1983:176). Cooke’s ‘a writer’s inkhorn’ (Cooke 1985: 104) and Zimmerli’s ‘a scribe’sinstrument’ comes close to such a scrotal wordplay (Zimmerli 1979b: 224). For Zimmerli,the English is far more telling than the German ‘original’, which has ‘Schreibzeug desSchreibers’ (Zimmerli 1979a: 188).
3
dual forms remain, one less obvious (waters, heavens, Egypt, Jerusalem),the other far more obvious, for they refer to natural pairs relating to thebody: eyes, ears, hands, feet, lips, hands (but also shoes, horns andwings). A question springs forth: why are the terms usually rendered loinsor abs in the dual form? We are, I would suggest, in the realm of testicles,nuts, the family jewels. Indeed, one cannot help wondering whether theBible is engaged emphatic overkill, for not only do we have the rare dualform for
halatsayim
and
motnayim
, but we also have two terms that meanthe same thing – as the parallelism in Isa 11:5 shows all too well.
Is this acase of naming each of the twins with a name that evokes its brother, liketweedledum and tweedledee, or frick and frack? The implication:
weqeseth hasofer bemotnayw
may well mean ‘thescribal pen(is) on his testicles’. Perhaps the King James Version edgesclosest with its ‘a writer’s inkhorn by his side’, but even here thetranslators quailed before the direct reference to balls and the scribalpenis. As if to firm up my reading, Isa 8:1 comes to my aid, for there wefind the prophet instructed to write
beheret ’nosh
, ‘with the stylus of aman’ or with ‘the manly stylus’
– hopefully it would be iron or evendiamond hard, as is Jeremiah ‘pen of iron’ (
’et bargel
in Jer 17:1). Hebrewtoo is fully aware of the elision between pen and penis. Needless to say,this phrase from Ezekiel 9 (backed up by Isa 8:1) has profoundimplications for understanding the ideological function of writing, of thescribe, of the writing prophet, of masculinity, and of the text we now read,which is the product of those scribes. Above all, it shows how closelypower, writing and masculinity are tied together in the biblical material weare considering. The following considers, first, how the sausage fest of prophetic masculinity is constructed, that is, how prophetic masculinityand writing rub up against one another. The second section explores theway this carefully constructed group session begins to break down.
Spermatic spluttering pen(ise)s: organising the sausage fest
El besiss
(the impudent one). – It has received this name becausefrom the moment that it gets stiff and long it does not care foranybody, lifts impudently the clothing of its master by raising itshead fiercely, and makes him ashamed while itself feels no shame.(Burton 1963: 92).
5
‘Righteousness shall be the girdle of his balls [
bemotnayw
]; and faithfulness the girdleof his nuts [
halatsayw
]’.
6
To suggest it merely means the ‘common script’ or ‘with an ordinary pen’ convenientlymisses the simple sense of this stylus (Childs 2001: 70; Beuken 2003: 213). Misleading aswell is Wildberger’s ‘”Unheils” griffel’ and Watts’s ‘stylus of disaster’ (Wildberger 1972:311-12; Watts 1985: 148).
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